Upstream

Potomac River Media is the consulting vehicle of George Linzer, a digital strategist, producer, and communicator who previously co-founded Bruce Presentations, a design and social marketing firm that created the Energy Star brand for the US Environmental Protection Agency and promoted other public-private partnership programs at EPA and the US Dept. of Energy. He later launched and published Lab Tests Online, a non-commercial, peer-reviewed, and patient-centered website on laboratory testing. After guiding the site for almost 14 years, he returned to consulting, leaving a site that was drawing 2.5 million visitors a month and that served as the cornerstone of a global network of branded websites in 17 countries and 14 languages.

When not leading these organizations, George has consulted to a range of government agencies, companies, and not-for-profits through Bruce Presentations, Potomac River Media, and as an employee of KPMG Consulting. His clients have been active in such diverse fields as environmental protection, conservation, and sustainability, medical diagnostics, distance learning in higher education and corporate training, consumer media, learning and architecture, and fitness and nutrition. George often partners with other solo consultants and companies to provide additional needed expertise.

In addition to his current consulting work, George is developing a project that offers unwavering focus on finding priority-driven solutions to problems handicapped by business and political puritanism.

Global Fishing Watch

Global Fishing Watch launched its public platform in 2016 as a project of oceans advocacy organization Oceana and partners Google and Skytruth. It was in the process of becoming its own independent 501(c)(3) when Potomac River Media was hired to provide marketing support in the spring of 2017. With several significant achievements in hand already and its pending independence, there was an opportunity and a need to expand its public identity and develop a plan that would build upon its initial impact on transparency in commercial fishing and ocean sustainability.

George conducted a landscape analysis and drafted a marketing strategy that refined the brand and repositioned the organization within the marketplace to emphasize the ecosystem of research that had rapidly grown around the free access it gave to the core components of its transparency platform – processed vessel data and an interactive fishing activity map. He also contributed to the organization’s 10-year vision and led the restructuring of the website’s content, as the strategy recommended, to better reflect the organization’s unique role and to surface the incredible activity stimulated by its public transparency platform. As part of the website update, he brought in Lead to Conversion to support development of a new, easier-to-manage back end and improved SEO for the site.

Lab Tests Online (for the American Association for Clinical Chemistry)

Hired full-time by AACC in January 2001 to develop an “experiment”, the experiment – Lab Tests Online – launched seven months later and quickly took its place as the go-to resource for patient information on laboratory tests. In its first month, the site hosted 88,000 visits and by the end of its first year, it had served its one millionth visitor. By the time George left 13 years later, the “experiment” was averaging 2.5 million visitors each month, was supported by more than 30 association partners and corporate sponsors, and had won numerous awards and kudos as one of the premier health sites on the web. It also served as the cornerstone of a global network of branded sites published in 17 countries and 14 languages, becoming a global standard for patient education. Alexa.com has ranked it among the top 100 health sites on the web.

In 2011, AACC celebrated the 10th anniversary of Lab Tests Online during its annual meeting in Atlanta. AACC published a celebratory booklet that nicely summarized the site’s history and success to that point.

Diagnostics Primer (for AdvaMedDx)

Building on their experience with Lab Tests Online, George and co-author Jalane Locke, the primary writer for Lab Tests Online, developed a forward-looking primer on laboratory diagnostics technology for AdvaMedDx, the association of diagnostics manufacturers. The intent was to provide staffers on Capitol Hill as well as other key audiences with an easy introduction to the technology and its many roles in healthcare.

One of the key findings in their research suggested an important link between the current trend towards using wearable and implantable technologies to measure chemistry of bodily fluids within the body (also known as in vivo diagnostics) and a reduction in testing errors. As these new technologies replace more traditional laboratory tests that require a blood draw or urine sample for analysis outside the body (in vitro diagnostics), there will be fewer test samples to collect and process prior to the actual analysis. Since it is in this pre-analytic phase of handling and processing test samples where most testing errors occur, it follows that the number of errors will be greatly reduced as the technology makes this transition to in vivo capability.

Emergency Response Program (for the US Environmental Protection Agency)

Developed for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the very early days when “the web” was new and still being called “the World Wide Web”, this site was designed to connect the public to a breadth and depth of information on the topic of emergency response involving oil spills and hazardous substance releases. Produced at a time when the public’s skepticism in the federal government was on the rise, the site emphasized the heroic efforts of front-line emergency responders and the federal and state infrastructures that so often successfully supported them. Even before it launched, it quickly proved to be a valuable resource for the professionals enlisted to test and review it as it gave them quick access to information they often had to refer to.

The site has undergone many changes since it was first launched more than two decades ago. Still, despite several organizational changes and facelifts, much of the original architecture and content drafted for the site remains online at https://www.epa.gov/emergency-response.